A New Way To Pay: With Euros

FRANKFURT, Germany — Clerks at the convenience store in the train station here kept two tills open on Tuesday, one for deutsch marks and the other for euros.

Aboard the Intercity express from this German financial capital to Berlin, the waiter in the restaurant car polled diners about their payment plans before taking orders, gauging his supply of the incoming and outgoing currencies with each meal served.

At the few other shops and services in business on this quiet New Year's holiday, money mostly remained segregated as merchants and vendors staved off for one more day the inevitable confusion over the new euro.

E-Day, as the launch of the Continent's common currency has been called throughout the elaborate planning period, dawned with hardly a hitch as citizens of the 12-nation "eurozone" celebrated 2002 much like the start of any other year.

"So far, so good," said Andreas Goralczyk, spokesman for the Federal Association of German Bankers in the largest and most influential euro country. "It appears our preparations were more than adequate."

Resistant consumers in Italy sabotaged some automatic teller machines with chewing gum, and French bank and postal employees were threatening a one-day strike today.

But for the most part, the first full day of the new economic bloc solidified by the euro was cause for pride and enthusiasm among the currency's users, even in countries where voters had little or no say about surrendering their old money.

In the Netherlands, one of the more euro-enthusiastic populations, more than 300,000 ATM transactions were conducted in the early hours of Tuesday as Dutch revelers took their champagne and pastry with them to stand in line for their first look at the cash, banking industry spokeswoman Jannemieke Zandee said.

French TV news focused on glitches at cash machines -- one of the few activities involving the new euro available on the holiday. But the French Banking Federation reported that the dispensing of the new currency was proceeding smoothly, with more than 25 million euros withdrawn in the first six hours.

In Brussels, Belgium -- headquarters of the 15-member European Union, which the currency is intended to more deeply integrate -- officials hailed E-Day as a quiet success: "No news is good news," executive commission spokesman Gerassimos Thomas said.

Cash machines in some countries were shut down overnight as a precaution against robberies. In Belgium and Ireland, consumers got their first look at their new money after daybreak.

In Spain, some banks opened for three hours in the middle of the day to provide customers with a chance to get their first euros. The gesture was so successful that lines stretched a football field's length from the teller counters and required more than two hours to negotiate.

The European Central Bank's strategy for disseminating the euro is twofold. ATMs are expected to put bills in shoppers' hands before business resumes today, and merchants are supposed to have armed themselves with euro coins and cash ahead of time so they can give change only in the new money.

Consumers can pay with their national currency or the euro through Feb. 28, the end of a two-month transition.